Julie Dickson remembers Joseph Raz

The main thing I want to say is to send my sympathy and my love to Penny and Noam and to say how very sorry I am for their loss. But just a couple of reminscences about Joseph come to mind as well. One is about his enormous intellectual modesty. When I was a graduate student of Joseph's, if during our supervision meetings he thought that my work could benefit from reading certain things, then so long as he did not write those things, he would explain to me clearly (though never in a patronising way) what he thought I should read. But if it happened to be something that he himself had written, he would instead go all "sotto-voce-intense-mumbling" on me. "Yes, and well, I suppose you could also look at something I have written on this, it is mmmmrgtsggk brlltwsssmn in the journal of glllbbbmmmrsng." "Sorry, what was that?" I was at least prepared to ask. "Oh just a short something I did in mmmthrrrwwwsss bllllrgghh." 

Joseph would not explain further, and I, in my stubborn Scottish pride, would not ask further. So supervisions at that point would reach a benign but somewhat weird stalemate of me frowning and pretending to write something down that I had not heard at all and Joseph looking out of a window or some such. I would then spend the next 6 weeks attempting to hunt down mmmmrgtsggk brlltwsssmn in the journal of glllbbbmmmrsng in a variety of libraries around Oxford. That was good though: it made me feel always that I was going on a "quest" to hunt references down, and indeed that is just one of the many ways in which Joseph gave me a strong sense that doing intellectual work was like a quest, an adventure, and that it was the work itself that drives that quest, not us: that we serve the work, as it were. There was also an occasion when, during a supervision, Joseph opened a small cupboard in his Balliol office to reveal a veritable shedload of off-prints of an article he had written sent to him by the publisher. "Look! It is ridiculous! What am I supposed to do with these?" he asked. A couple of days later I discovered that a kind of answer had come to him when I went to my pigeon hole in Holywell Manor, Balliol's graduate annex where I lived, to find that I had received from Joseph one of the off-prints in question (I think he sent them to all his students). It came with a classic note that I will never forget, and it resonates the better with me still in our current times of sometimes relentless self-promotion: "I have too many of these. Give it to anyone, or just throw it away. Joseph."

The second reminiscence is just of Joseph's immense commitment to, and kindness to, his graduate students. My intellectual debt to him is profound, although, as with all his students, he never encouraged me to follow his own thinking, and wanted always his students to have intellectual independence and to do their own thing. But its his sensitivity and kindness, especially (but not only) in the early years of my career, when I struggled to find the right place for me to work, and was, for a variety of reasons, not very happy in my professional life, that I carry with me always. Amongst other things, to try to help me, and in a wonderful sort of "moving in mysterious ways in the background" manner of facilitating things, Joseph took me to the pub for drinks, met me for pizza lunch, suggested we met up to go to films at the cinema, wrote to others in the profession working at institutions where I was moving to, suggesting lightly that they meet me for lunch or coffee to help me settle in, responded so supportively to all manner of emails I sent him, listened many times over to my troubles. And much more. But I hope this conveys the sense of it. I try in my own ways to pass on what I can of some of this with my own students, both undergraduates and graduates. I am so happy that he was a (big) part of my life, with all this, and also with his eye-rolling at pretentiousness (and at many other things!), mischievousness, and giggling. 

Julie Dickson, Professor of Legal Philosophy, Oxford